Philip van Damme, prof. dr.

Philip Van Damme (MD, PhD) is a professor of neurology at the University Hospitals in Leuven (Belgium), where he is leading the Neuromuscular Reference Center. He studied neurology at KU Leuven medical school. During his neurology training, he did a PhD on disease mechanisms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and continued to work on this disease after graduating in 2006. In 2008 he was a visiting neuromuscular fellow at the MGH, Boston and visiting researcher at the Day Laboratory for Neuromuscular Research, Harvard Medical School in Boston. Since 2009, he has been appointed as neuromuscular specialist at the neurology department in UZ Leuven and as professor at the department of Neuroscience at KU Leuven. He is leading the ALS program that involves the diagnosis, treatment and multidisciplinary care for patients with ALS. He is actively involved in clinical research, including genetic, biomarker and neuroimaging studies and clinical trials with new treatments for ALS. He currently is the chair of the EAN guideline panel on ALS.

He also is a principal investigator in the laboratory for Neurobiology, Neuroscience Department at the University of Leuven. Within the Leuven Brain Institute he is the founding co-chair of the Leuven Center for ALS research (LEUCALS). His current basic research focuses on genetic modifiers of ALS and on disease pathways in pluripotent stem cell models derived from ALS patients.